Hacker News Reader

Comment by idkyall | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a bit of selection bias here in that only people who are either very enamored or very unhappy with scrum are going to respond to a hot take on twitter.

But, that's besides the point. Scrum doesn't exist to make developer's lives easier. In my experience as a SWE in a scrum team, devs have basically always felt like our time is being wasted in meetings.

Scrum, imo, exists so that management and business stakeholders can have an understanding of how efforts are being allocated and give feedback on it. There's still plenty of ways this can go wrong, and I agree with others that the short sprint cycles of 1-2 weeks lead to the extra overhead of too many ceremonies, but I think for the average business stakeholder it probably gives a better result than waterfall.

View on HN

> devs have basically always felt like our time is being wasted in meetings.

I think that's key. My experience is that I have often told my managers that "I don't need this meeting personally, so unless somebody else needs me in this meeting, I am losing my time".

Do you know what the managers usually answered? "I disagree, I think this meeting is useful for you. We are having this meeting to help you developers".

No wonder I don't respect my managers then, and now I happily waste my time in their meetings.

Scrum practitioners often spout weird propaganda. I once remarked that a programming task might be time-intensive, and difficult to accomplish quickly in a process as meeting-heavy as Scrum. The Scrum Master then linked me to a FAQ item on some pro-Scrum web site which purported to assure us that Scrum teams spend far fewer hours per week in meetings compared to other teams. She might've had a point, albeit a small one, if:

* standups were limited to 15 min/day (all Scrum teams I'd been on took 30 min, minimum, to do standup)

* we actually had 1 hour retro, planning and refinement meetings (retro, the most useful meeting, was actually 1.5h, planning and refinement could take 2h)

* POs did not feel free to schedule arbitrary additional meetings to keep up with the increasing backlog. SAFe specifies a quarterly, multi-day, division-wide planning meeting to align disparate teams during which all the work you intended to do for the next six sprints was scheduled on a big board. Of course there was never enough time to point and schedule six sprints' worth of work, necessitating a pre-planning meeting, and sometimes a pre-pre-planning meeting. Hours each.

The meetings are good. You're getting paid during them. I managed to customise my bike, plan two international adventures, run a side business and do a year of a degree in pointless meetings in the last 5 years!

Yep. I have come to love Scrum for the dysfunction it provides as a remote employee. I can sit in the background and do other things while not being expected to achieve anything.

Eyes are watching. Your manager is likely to bring up that you're not an active enough participant in meetings; and yes, it will count against you in your performance reviews.

Manager isn't in the Scrum meetings most of the time. Self managing team and all...

Manager doesn't have to be in the meetings to become aware of problems you pose for the Scrum process. Multiple sets of eyes are watching.

Manage isn't in the meetings here because he's abusing the process too and slacking off fixing his outhouse and car.

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner. Tell him what he's won, Johnny!

Enlightenment came to me when I realized that companies only adopt Agile for reasons that benefit executives and management, not developers, to wit: fine-grained observability and direct control over the SDLC itself. It's really a game of Mornington Crescent: the team pretends to be playing one game when they're actually playing a different sort of game.

> management and business stakeholders can have an understanding of how efforts are being allocated and give feedback on it

I agree that devs can often mistake this need for wasted time. That does _not_ mean that Scrum is the best way to not waste time. A good project manager can get that info without so many full team meetings.

I guess one way to put it is that scrum is a clear way to lead a project (which is what entices people) but its not a great way.

>I think there's a bit of selection bias here in that only people who are either very enamored or very unhappy with scrum are going to respond to a hot take on twitter.

All 10 of the former?

Well - since he did say they were mostly people with the title 'scrum master' or 'agile coach' defending it, perhaps a better phrasing is "people whose livelihoods depend on it" :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com